Making the pieces fit

“You can be just an OK health care provider, but we’re trying to train health care
providers that people seek.” — Julie Ann Justo

For Julie Ann Justo, it’s about making the pieces fit.

Justo, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy and outcomes sciences at the University
of South Carolina, specializes in infectious diseases — learning how they work and
how to best treat them.

“I love puzzles, and infectious diseases are very much a puzzle,” Justo says. “You
have the patient, and you have their symptoms, but then you also have the bug, and
you have to match the bug with the drug. There can be multiple right answers, but
there’s normally one or two optimal answers. That space between what’s acceptable
and what’s optimal is really the majority of what I do on a daily basis.”

Justo, a 2017 Clinical Teaching Award winner, puts her puzzle-solving passion to work
in both the classroom and at her in-patient practice site at Palmetto Health Richland,
where the two students per month who go on rounds with her have to be able to process
a lot of information.

“My rotation normally fills up very quickly, but the word on the street is that it’s
long hours,” Justo says. “Motivated students are the ones seeking that out. They’re
coming wanting to learn, but knowing they might be there for 12 hours.”

Justo, a board-certified pharmacotherapy specialist with added qualifications in infectious
diseases, and her students often work with HIV patients, some of whom serve as peer
health advocates.

“We’ve really learned the value of our patients as educators,” she says. “The patient
is part of the team. In HIV care in particular, when they go home, they’re the ones
that are going to be motivating themselves to take medication every day and get through
the side effects and come back for the clinic visit.”

I love puzzles, and infectious diseases are very much a puzzle.

Julie Ann Justo

While Justo has seen HIV care improve and the stigma surrounding it lessen, uninformed
perceptions still exist. Justo says her students were surprised to hear a recent patient
mention being refused dental care because of her HIV-positive status.

“HIV-positive patients are very aware of how close providers are willing to get, whether
or not they’re willing to shake their hand or give them a hug,” Justo says. “Just
a simple touch on the shoulder can be enough to help them with that trust.”

To lighten what can be heavy subject matter, Justo employs a bit of humor in her classroom.
Her office contains shelves full of large stuffed microbes, including a pink spirochete
symbolizing syphilis and a red-and-white virus with a rooster’s comb representing
chicken pox. Students form teams based on the microbe mascots and compete in Jeopardy-styled
classroom competitions.

“If it’s grim every day, people get burned out,” Justo says. “I use these kinds of
things to keep it light.”

Her ultimate goal for her students, though, is quite serious.

“At this point in their careers, it’s less about the letter grade and more about,
‘Would you trust yourself to care for someone you love?’ ” Justo says. “You can be
just an OK health care provider, but we’re trying to train health care providers that
people seek.”

Clinical Practice Teaching Award

Each year, two faculty members are recognized for outstanding clinical teaching, practice,
advising and mentoring of health sciences students. The award is open to full-time,
non-tenure-track faculty members, who have taught clinical practice courses at Carolina
for at least three years.